Update on the living room

I still need to switch out the lamp and figure out window coverings and sew new throw pillows, but the living room is starting to feel like a real room again.

Just a reminder of what it looked like before:

And the huge cracked mirror behind the artwork on the mantle . . .

 . . . which we had to dismantle . . .

We know the mirror wasn't original to the house because it was stamped with "April '52" all over the back.

Spackle, spackle, paint, paint, paint! Swap in the boy's couch for mine and grab the painting from the dining room.

My grandma was stoked to see her clock over the mantle.

I found this label in the attic when Greg and I tried to fix the noisy bathroom fan.

The last mention of the Albina Shingle Company in The Oregonian was on May 3, 1946 when the  factory burned down. So I think that label dates from pretty close to when the house was built in 1938. It very likely came in the package with the original roof.

The view from the dining room.

Of course, these didn't go anywhere. I will not apologize for my Battlestar Galactica prints.

What do you think? Are my modern pieces playing well with the boy's traditional couch or do I need to kick him out?

That weird crawlspace

So that weird crawlspace that was added underneath the dining room is only accessible via this window in the basement.

The former owners made weird decisions (like burying things in the yard) and they liked to use the crawlspaces as storage.

There were, if I remember correctly, 23 bags of insulation in the main crawlspace. My electrician pulled them out for me (I don't get in the crawlspace because of SPIDERS, OH MY GOD SPIDERS) and my contractor friend took them off my hands.

The weird crawlspace was apparently used as a junkyard.

We found a bag of potting soil, a broom, an old window screen, and a lot of small pieces of wood. The boy awesomely volunteered to pull on his hoodie and his workgloves and fetch them through the window. I held the flashlight and SCREAMED when a huge spider came coasting down onto the boy.

Oddly, he didn't seem to appreciate this.

But it's clean and we didn't kill each other afterward, so I think we can call this one a victory.

Wherein the boy should get a medal too.

Just a warning on this post: BAD PHOTOS, AHOY. I was working in low-light/flash situations and they look terrible.

I was doing some research on my house and I decided to ask for help from the Multnomah County librarians. I always feel a little sneaky doing that, being that I'm a librarian and all, but nobody knows how to use their resources better than them. They found this newspaper clipping:

One of the houses I blacked out is mine. My house is modern! Hell yeah it is.

I also found this historic map that showed the proposed design of my house. It doesn't match the way my house looks now.

My house actually looks like this, with no nose at the front of the house.

The boy checks pretty frequently on Zillow to see how my house is doing. I don't do that because it's depressing (and I don't think it's accurate). It turns out one of the OTHER houses mentioned in that newspaper clipping is currently for sale.  And from the pictures it looks EXACTLY like mine on the inside. The boy got megapoints for that find.

I've written before that I don't believe my dining room has always been this big. I think it used to be two rooms.

Exhibit A: the hardwoods in this room inexplicably end about six inches past where the carpeting begins. There's only subfloor under the grody, grody carpet.

 

Exhibit B: this window in the basement looks into a very small square crawlspace that runs underneath the far corner of the dining room where the windows are. It meets the main crawlspace only via a small ventilation hole. That's not normal. I think it used to see daylight.

Exhibit C: there's a high spot on the dining room floor where that wall with the window to the crawlspace hits. Something is amiss.

Exhibit D: variegation in the finish on the wall . . .

 . . . which makes me think a wall used to be here. 

I really wanted to look inside that house for sale, so I sent an email to the realtor and asked. We pretended we were househunting and I have such a terrible memory, would he mind if I took photos? Playing spies is FUN. I was worried that Greg wouldn't be able to play the part because he's an enginerd but he was awesome. He totally kept the guy involved while I measured and took photos.

Their living room is identical to mine. They have the same fireplace tile (many people told me mine wasn't original, *coughDADcough*), except that they have twelve tiles across where I have ten.

Theirs

Mine

Oh, looky here. They have half as much dining room as I do. Their dining room ends right about where my wood flooring runs out. Hmmm.

Theirs

Mine

We both have excellent taste in living room paint colors!

Into the kitchen we go. They didn't retain any of the original tile or fixtures, sadly.

Theirs

Mine. We win because we have Gatorade.

That light fixture above the sink is going SOON. So what's on the other side of that dining room wall?

A breakfast nook!

Theirs

Mine

We measured the depth of their breakfast nook, which was 78", corresponding exactly to the high point on my dining room floor.

Their house was really dilapidated and sadly had lost a lot of the original charm. They bumped out their attic, adding two bedrooms upstairs (but no bathroom). This is good food for thought, should we ever want to add on.

We also discovered in the basement that they have the original oil tank!

Their window looks into their front yard.

This is excellent news for me. I had assumed that the tank was buried on my property, which makes it a hugely expensive pain in the ass to decommission and remove. If the tank has leaked (and they always leak) they have to bring in a back hoe to remove ALL the contaminated soil. My neighbors three doors down did this and spent $15,000. $15,000 for something that doesn't even look pretty or improve the function of your house. $15,000 to basically mess up your yard.

I looked at the historical permits and theirs look the same as mine. Both are labeled as underground yard units.

Theirs

Mine

It might explain what this random pipe in the side of my house is. Maybe where they used to fill the tank?

So, to recap, here's what I think happened. My house used to look like this in the front, with a separate dining room and breakfast nook.

They knocked down the interior wall between the dining room and the nook and brought the exterior nook wall out so it was flush with the outer wall of the dining room, creating a dining room on steroids and an exterior that looks like this.

Clear as mud? Am I crazy to think this or even care about it? Don't answer that.

I had so much fun being sneaky with Greg that I think we should quit our jobs and become grifters. Just think of how much more interesting this blog would be.

A man-cave fit for a man in a cave.

It's almost been a year since I put the flooring in the basement and I've never really done anything with it. Just a friendly reminder of what it looked like when I moved in:

 

And then I did all that work last winter so it looked like this.

And yesterday my electrician came out and configured all the plugs so we wouldn't have to run an extension cord from the dryer area to the finished portion of the basement. And now it looks like this:

It's starting to look like a real room! It needs baseboard and window trim but it's getting there! I grabbed the painting from the reveal that used to be over the living room mantle.

But don't look over there; when I do I get the theme song to Sanford and Son stuck in my head.

The boy and I have an agreement, stolen from a very smart friend, that we will keep everything we own for the first year of living together. So we have two beds and lots of duplicate kitchen gear that got boxed up and stored in the garage and basement. The last thing you want to do after a relationship ends is to have to buy a new bed (or a new cheese grater, or whatever) because you got rid of yours when you moved in together. So we'll reassess in a year or two or whenever we feel like it and then we can start to pare down our stuff. But for right now we have a mattress in the alcove.

Now I'm itching to paint the wood paneling that lines the stairs down to the basement and replace that nasty carpet.

And lastly, Hall and Oates will finally have to go.

Celebrating

Six or seven years ago I made a new year's resolution to drink more champagne. Not for boozy reasons, but rather in the spirit of celebrating small things. So I have a small number of corks from momentous times (getting accepted to grad school, my reveal, Greg moving in . . . ) and no good way to really display them.

I grabbed an Ikea Ribba frame, the 9x9 one with the recessed mat.

I drew a grid on the back so the corks would be equally spaced.

I put nails through the back of the frame where the grid lines crossed.

Then I put the corks on the nails and labeled the occasion they marked.

I think a different color paper would look better, no? I'm not sure I like it yet but an excuse to drink more champagne is never a bad thing.